There have been plenty of times - trips to the beach, for instance, or even just from house to bar after having predrinking with friends - that I had a sober driver and would have enjoyed sipping a beer on the way. The only thing stopping me was the law. What damage would I have done by drinking that beer?
Ah, you missed his earlier response. The answer, you see, is if you have a sip of beer in the back seat, the designated driver will feel compelled to join in and drink while he’s driving, thereby getting drunk and crashing the car.
I saw that, I was just hoping he’d offer a more real life answer.
A more believable answer would be that you’d have someone drinking while driving, and then if they get stopped, just lie and say it was only the passengers.
It’s still stupid, but slightly less so than his original one.
I would be comfortable with the BAC between .10 and .12 and let the cops prove impairment. Our current yellow zone in ontario is .05 has more to do with political grandstanding with the fiberals, and MADD.
Declan
Any actual research I’ve seen says that people who kill people while driving drunk, or otherwise cause serious accidents, are well above .08. So if you want to stop innocent people from being killed by drunk drivers, then focus on preventing the obscenely drunk (usually the habitual drunk drivers) from getting on the road. If you just want to prevent people from having fun in areas without 24/7 public transit, then I guess you should make rules against driving with the slightest bit of alcohol in your veins, even if it hasn’t been shown to be dangerous.
I would say have graduated enforcements. If you are driving dangerously, then you get slapped with the ridiculous penalties we currently have for any drunk driver. If you are not, but still test at an elevated BAC level, then you get a ticket. We need to focus on harm reduction, not just making the most draconian penalties possible.
That’s the usual “reason” I hear from officials about this law, but it still doesn’t make sense: if you let the driver use the breathalyzer, it won’t help that he has passed the parcel; and if he is sober, he can continue transporting his three-quarters full bottle of scotch to his friend.
I’ve never heard this. Who did these studies? What did they look at - accidents resulting in deaths being reported (to whom)? How did they determine the alcohol content of all parties accurately?
I know that many different groups, scientists as well as the ADAC, have done simulator studies and that even one glass of wine or beer shows measurable results in reaction time, tunnel vision etc.
Given that accidents have been caused (going by what comes up to the courts) by people being distracted for one second switching the radio channel, picking up a dropped cigarette, loud children, micro-sleep, etc., I wonder why only heavily drunk drivers would cause serious accidents. There could be some self-selection in that most people drink in the evening, and are thus driving home late at night, when the roads are mostly empty, compared to the normal distraction that occurs during daylight heavy traffic.
But the habitual drunk aren’t observable by their bad style, because they are used to it. So the best way to capture the dangerous drunks would seem to me to check all drivers with breathalyzers - which it seems (I still haven’t gotten a definite answer to that) is for some reason not usual in the US?
If you want to be taken seriously, then I guess you should leave out hyperbole and unrelated topics.
If your country is so lacking in infrastructure that it has neither public transport (nobody says it has to be 24/7) nor any of the other options against drunk disco driving - party buses, designated drivers, the canadian drivers on call (volunteers who come to drive you home) etc. - then that is a seperate problem from people who are so irresponsible that they drive after drinking, instead of arranging things beforehand.
It would be one thing if we were talking about teenagers at 18 or 19 who do dumb things because they are still learning to think ahead. But I’m shocked at how many adult Dopers in this thread are convinced that driving a bit drunk is no problem. It really confirms the stereotype of a nation of teenagers who want all the freedom but none of the responsibility for their actions.
If you are an adult, and you want to drink, then you make sure you can get home safely without driving yourself. What’s so difficult about that?
What’s draconian about loosing your license for some months for having a seriously high BAC? And for the smaller levels, yes, you get points and a ticket, but don’t loose the license here.
0% is a stupid limit as it would then be triggered by a sip of Communion wine, or use of mouthwash and be prosecutable. Having some actual penalties that were not a joke is what we need for impaired drivers. The person that has a 5th DUI shouldn’t ever be able to get to that 5th DUI.
Here in the Nordic countries, where public transportation ranges from crappy to nonexistent outside big cities and long distances are the norm, allowing drunk people to have open containers of alcohol inside a car promotes safety. Drunk people will go to places using automobiles, no matter what the law. Allowing this, but demanding a sober designated driver works perfectly, as people can be law-abiding and still get drunk and go for a ride. If open containers were forbidden, there’d be little incentive to self-enforce the designated driver system by the populace, as people would be breaking the law and risking penalties no matter what. As it is, there’s always a designated driver at hand for the partiers, usually a person who doesn’t like to drink all that much, anyway, and now has a perfect alibi in a heavily booze-centric society.
Missed the edit window:
No, designated drivers aren’t tempted to take a sip offered from the backseat, as the concept is clear even to school kids and honored by all but the seriously messed-up multi-offenders.
Any sensible country enforcing a 0% limit would have some kind of safety margin thrown into the analysis work. Just as when the nice police offices pulls me over after lasering me and tells me I’m gonna get a ticket for driving 10kph too fast. If I’m fined for 10, the laser showed at least 13, but they routinely subtract a more-than-reasonable safety margin before writing me the ticket.
0% is perfectly enforcable provided you’re able to understand that any measurement or analysis is prone to error and design your regulations accordingly.
Actually, I’d like to know the answer to that question as well, since I only have anecdotal impressions from one of the US states:
Is it possible to be pulled over in the US for a breathalyzer test without any apparent reason?
Do you have, as we have in Europe, “roadblocks” where every third, or seventh, or any random car is stopped and the driver required to take a breathalyzer test? And where refusing to take said breathalyzer test is considered to be reasonable grounds to take you in for a blood sample?